Beet (3 page)

“Let's kidnap Latin,” said Bagtoothian, meaning Latin the Pig, the school mascot, a picture-perfect Large White who was taken to escaping his pen, galumphing around campus, and peeing everywhere with the range and power of a golf course sprinkler. “If he pisses on us we'll kill him and eat him.”

“We're not killing anybody,” said Matha, to Bagtoothian's distress. She considered. “We'll occupy a building! If the tactic was good enough in the sixties, it's good enough for us.”

“But it
wasn't
good enough in the sixties,” Dickie protested. “It never worked. Not at Harvard, not at Columbia, or Berkeley. Kids just got themselves like beat up by the cops.” His voice quavered. “I don't want to get like beat up.”

“Me neither,” said Betsy Betsy, a jittery sophomore who was small enough to fit into a case for a sousaphone, and had Betty Boop eyes without the allure. Effervescent at eighteen, in her fifties she would be a dead lightbulb hanging in a basement in Bridgeport.

Betsy feigned loyalty to the party line of no gainful employment, but secretly wanted to forge a career as a media reporter. She rationalized her treachery by concluding that media reporting would not really be working.

“Couldn't we just walk around yelling things in unison?” she said. “I like it when we do that.”

Jamie Lattice, a junior, said nothing, but his tiny old man's face twitched at the thought that if he went to jail he might never realize his membership in the New York literati. What he most wanted was to be a New York Public Library Literary Lion, and he was debating whether to write a how-to book or a cookbook to win the honor. Before coming over to Matha's room he'd spent twenty minutes at the mirror, practicing a look that combined Age of Innocence promise with fin de siècle despair.

“For shit's sake!” Matha exploded. “They're not going to beat us up. In the sixties, the colleges didn't give a shit about their shit-ass image because they weren't worried about money. But now they're all going broke, and they're oh-so-careful about how they come across on TV. These shitheads are not going to call the cops, I promise you. They'll call the incident ‘unfortunate' or ‘disturbing' or ‘sad' or some fuck like that.” Then she added: “You have to remember: The professors of today were yesterday's protestors.”

“But I still don't see why we have to close the college,” said Betsy.

“It's a statement,” said Matha, who was about to add “shitnose,” but held back because she knew Betsy would burst into cartoonsize tears for little or no reason. “We close down Beet College, dear old much-sought-after Beet College, to show the world that college is useless. Who needs it? I mean, look at the situation this morning. That ass-shit Bollovate and his brains-for-shit trustees were about to close the place for a few bucks anyway. What difference does it make who shuts the college down? What is college for? Zip! And what do we do when we graduate? Make indie films about sex in Tribeca? Tread water in graduate school? An M.F.A., for fuck's sake?” The group guffawed. “We're toast! That's the statement we want to make.” She considered a moment. “You know what? I think we're the lost generation. That's what I think. We should call ourselves The Lost Generation.”

Her comrades were confused but aroused. “That's a great name,” said Jamie. “The Lost Generation.” He thought of using it in his inaugural essay for
Harper's
.

“What building do you want to take?” asked Bagtoothian, who was watching Akim out the window, still itching to get at him.

That required some discussion. If they took the administration building, it would not mean much because the dither of deans would vacate their offices gladly and await instructions from President Huey. If they took President Huey's office, he would vacate gladly and await instructions from Bollovate or from anyone else with instructions. If they took a departmental building, that would do no damage at all because the faculty members were always
ready to turn against the administration on the slightest provocation, or none, or to turn against one another.

Pity, the one professor whom Matha and her cohorts could not count on to betray either the administration or his colleagues was the same Professor Porterfield to whom the salvation of Beet College had been entrusted. That dismayed Matha. In seeking to close Beet down, she was in reality on the side of the trustees, who, the natural businesswoman in her surmised, would rather dump Beet and cut their losses than keep it going. If Peace Porterfield saved the college, said Matha, the radical movement would be no more, since closing the college was their one true cause.

“So let's take Porterfield's office,” said Bagtoothian, who merely wanted to push someone down a flight of stairs.

“No. He's too well-liked,” Matha said. “It's not a matter of singling out an individual. We have to occupy something that is central to Beet, and better still, central to a liberal arts education in general, so when the rest of the country sees what we've done, they will know that not just Beet College but higher learning itself has been brought to its knees.”

“Let's take the Free Speech Zone,” said Goldvasser. Everyone chortled.

The Free Speech Zone, a twelve-by-twelve-foot plot of lawn at the far west end of the campus, was the area in which anyone connected with the college could voice an opinion. It was created in response to complaints, mainly from faculty members, that things were being said in the dorms and the classrooms, on the pathways, and in the bathrooms as well, that offended some people, or could be construed as offending some people, or might have offended some people had the remarks been heard. The first speaker to make use of the new area was a sophomore from Pennsylvania who stood dead center in the grassy square, cupped her hands to her mouth, and shouted that she had mixed feelings about the Quakers.

The students considered, then all five said it at once. “The library! Let's take Bacon Library!”

“The library!” said Dickie.

“The library!” said Betsy.

“The library!” said Bagtoothian, who had not yet set foot in one, but looked forward to the adventure.

“The library?” asked Jamie, who anticipated he would be ill the night of the takeover.

“So it's the library,” said Matha.

It was an impeccable choice. How better to put an end to institutions of higher learning—perhaps even to learning itself—than to pull down the very warehouse of learning, the time-honored repository of the best that was ever thought or felt, and keep it from future generations? Bacon Library was the lifeblood of the college. Matha and her comrades had hit upon a course of action at last, and yet an action that would effect inaction, the great work stoppage of the mind.

Not only that: the library displayed the Mayflower Compact—a document, in terms of pure rarity, even more valuable than the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Though the original compact did not exist, the William Bradford copy in Bacon was a treasure in part because
Mayflower
passenger Bradford was the first governor of the Plymouth Colony. The document, dated 1630, was signed by John Alden and Miles Standish, among other notables, and was the first written American expression of the intent to “combine together in a civil body politic.”

“Damn!” said Matha. “We bring down the library, we bring down the college, we bring down the country!”

“Is that like a good thing?” said Goldvasser.

They looked to one another, but no one knew for sure.

“When do we go? Tonight?” asked Bagtoothian.

“No,” said Matha. “It's got to be planned out. I think we should wait till Porterfield's committee is about to make its report to the faculty. There's a meeting on December nineteenth, which is probably when they'll do it. If we go in on the eighteenth, that should shit things up, or fuck them up, or something.”

“What do we do in the meantime?” said Lattice, hoping that in the meantime they'd drop the plan.

“Small stuff,” said Matha. “Minor annoyances that get in the way of the committee.”

The group was happy and high-fived one another to prove it, and low-fived one another as well, and bumped chests and fists. Most of their courses demanded no intellectual effort. But a series of disruptions? That was something they could sink their teeth into.

“Use for the useless!” cried Matha, not entirely sure what she meant.

“Use for the useless!” cried the others.

“My darling! My sweet! My heart is breaking!” Producing his iPod, on which he'd recorded a medley of Syrian love songs, Akim sang along with “My Sheep Are in the Pasture.”

Matha nodded to Bagtoothian. “Now.”

LIVI WAS ON A TEAR AGAIN. HER EYES BLAZED GREEN, AND
she yanked at her hair, which looked on fire. “Keelye Smythe? That snake in the grass? You appointed Keelye Smythe?”

“I can handle him.”

“That's what you always say. Jesus, Mary, and Moses! I married a babe in the woods!”

“I know what Keelye is, but he's also smart.”

“Everybody's smart. But not everybody's good.”

“Well, pickings weren't exactly cherse.”

“Because the only people who want to join committees are jerks.”

That was their conversation of the previous night, when Peace told Livi whom he had named to the CCR, the shorthand by which Peace's committee on curriculum reform was now known. He'd used the two days since the Day of the Bollovate to select the members. He knew he might have done better, but he was pressed for time—two months to come up with a plan to save the college—and while it may have been hard for Livi to believe, the six he'd come up with appeared to be the best of the applicant pool.

Pickings from Peace's own department had been the slimmest. Apart from Smythe, applicants included the minor poet Willa
George, founder of the Beets, a local group in the 1960s who rebelled against Kerouac's bunch, pooh-poohed jazz, ridiculed Zen, said no to drugs, and wrote blank verse; Johnny Claque, the only independently wealthy department member, who'd struck it rich with a bodice-ripper, and was said to be one; and Larry Gunderson, the Shakespearean who could recite the 128th Sonnet in 5.3 seconds, and could not be stumped on questions about Edmund Spenser, no matter how hard one tried.

Manning had told him so—“I told you so”—earlier in the day, when Peace was putting his committee together. “This assignment will bring you in contact with every mad dog in the college.”

“Very helpful. Instead of being so all-knowing,” said Peace, “why don't you serve on the CCR yourself?”

“Because I only
look
crazy.”

On the morning of October 17, Peace crossed the quad of the Old Pen toward the CCR's first meeting in Bacon Library. He was already beginning to feel he'd entered a new world, and in some ways he had. He had never served on a major committee, much less headed one, either here or at Yale, where a lowly assistant professor was not accorded the honor. One of the less substantive reasons he was so well-liked at Beet was that he had not been involved in its business. All he knew about being a professor was students, teaching, and learning, and this skewed and narrow prospect of academic life deprived him of the full, rich picture.

“Down with Beet! Close the college!” chanted Matha and her band of revolutionaries. They stomped back and forth on the lawn.

“You want to close the college?” Peace asked them as he walked past. But they kept chanting and drowned him out.

Reaction from the faculty to the news of his assignment was as swift as Matha Polite's. It ran the gamut from sneering contempt to indifferent contempt. As long as young Professor Porterfield kept his head down, there had been no reason to anoint him with the traditional loathing reserved for the prominent. But, as the Japanese say, the nail that sticks up is the one that gets hammered. On
the other hand, Peace's sudden celebrity, however shaky, opened the path for others to share in it. So the outward response of his colleagues—save Manning, of course—was boisterous bonhomie, which gave Peace the willies.

But the sight of Bacon was always reassuring to him. One of the few structures not built in the small-college idiom, the library filled the south end of the stockade of the Old Pen, grand and solid, its dusty Ionic columns crowned by volutes curled downward like inverted scrolls. Something about the height of the steps and the stylobate made the building appear even larger than it was, and when taken in from a distance, it seemed forbidding, like a bank vault. Perhaps for that reason, some years earlier an anonymous wag chalked a notice on the outer wall that read: “This is not the library. The library is inside.”

“Professor Porterfield?”—Peace was about to mount the steps. “We've never been formally introduced. I'm Professor Marigold Jefferson—of the I Am Woman Center?” She wore her hair in tight blond curls, which though real, looked like a wig. And she had the half-sloshed eyes of a giraffe, and seemed as tall. Peace nodded. He knew little about her, save that the previous spring she'd written and performed a one-woman play at the Beet Theater Club, called
Yeast,
in which she dressed as the infection. Reviewers found it “vile yet brave.”

“I hope you won't find this presumptuous,” she said. “But I just wanted to say that whatever curriculum you come up with, it should feature the work of Mariah Carey. Don't you agree?”

“I'm not sure I understand you,” said Peace. Jefferson was the sort of person he feared most from his childhood—sixties-generation friends of his parents who used a stare of aggressive innocence to coax others into crazy and dangerous situations.

“You know my work on Mariah Carey?” she asked.

“I'm afraid I don't.”

“It's considered seminal. I've been writing a book-length essay on Mariah as the nexus of American song and dance. It would fit into the new curriculum beautifully, don't you think?”

Not knowing what to say, Peace smiled faintly and continued on, but had not progressed three steps when the radicals' favorite, Tufts Godwin—Professor Sensodyne of the Sensitivity and Diversity Council—called his name. Godwin had hair like a thatched roof with no house under it, and the vague and hulking form of a woolly mammoth. Peace had successfully avoided his company for four years, but, as Manning had predicted, after the Day of the Bollovate there would be no avoiding anyone.

“A word, Professor Porterfield?” His eyes seemed to peer out from pallets of fur, with the sharp and brainless scrutiny of an animal. “I'm sure you must be sensitive to this, but you and your committee have a great opportunity to do something for the plagiarists.”

“What are you talking about?” That came out more harshly than Peace intended.

“Well, you know how poorly they are thought of, I mean still, right now, as if we weren't living in the twenty-first century.” Peace kept waiting for a signal to laugh. “We at S and D have come to think of plagiarists as our last civil rights issue. For God's sake, some Neanderthals still treat them like lepers.”

“But they
should
be treated like lepers,” said Peace. “They're thieves.” It came to him that Godwin chaired a committee that had let off a sophomore charged with plagiarizing Emerson's
Self-Reliance
word for word, changing only “whoso would be a man must be non-conformist” to “whoso would be a person with human feelings.” The student had explained his work as an
homage.

“I guess I should have realized,” said Godwin, turning on his heels. “They would have appointed a conservative.”

Out of nowhere, Dean Wee Willy Baedeker rushed up and pressed a sheet of paper into Peace's hand. Baedeker, whose life's ambition was to appear on public television, was sort of a reverse centaur in miniature. He had the body of a small man and the head of a pony. “Read it,” he said. “Give me some feedback.” He trotted away.

Peace read:

“Professor Porterfield?” Now it was Ferritt Lawrence, a reporter on the
Pig's Eye
, the college (“Beet is Our Beat”) daily. Lawrence had a brilliantine head and a face on which curiosity battled with ignorance, and lost. He was majoring—or concentrating, as it was called at Beet—in communications arts, and was writing his senior honors thesis, “The Media: Has It Lost Its Credibility?” Naturally, he was pursuing the story of Peace's committee. “Rumors were swirling,” he wrote in his notepad. “They are spreading like wildfire.”

“What can you give me?” he asked. “I was hoping for a far-ranging interview.”

“Nothing,” said Peace. “The committee is meeting for the first time this morning. Even so, it wouldn't be a good idea to talk until we really have a plan”—with the smile he'd given Marigold Jefferson.

“The people have a right to know, Professor.”

Entering Bacon at last, Peace was tempted to cry “Sanctuary!” and had just tossed Baedeker's memo when he noticed Akim Ben Laden seated at a carrel, his head in his hands. He'd had the boy in a seminar on Conrad the previous year, and though Akim was loony, he was also bright and sweet-natured. Besides, it came as something of a relief to encounter a nutcase who knew that he was one.

“What's the matter?” Peace asked, realizing the question might be too open-ended.

“Homeland Security, Professor Porterfield.”

“It's interfering with your work as a terrorist?” He indicated he was kidding.

“No. It's the only concentration I could get into. And it's awful. I can't find a single professor to talk to because all the courses are online. Besides, I think there's only one professor in the department.”

“Why not switch out?” Peace had only just learned about the Homeland Security department. It was dreamed up by Bollovate and Huey over the previous summer, when no faculty were around to vote it up or down. The brochure (online) advertised Homeland Security as “the nation's leading growth sector,” and said the concentration would lead to careers in law enforcement, public safety, SWAT team memberships, and hazmat expertise. Homeland Security required no classrooms, none of the paraphernalia of real courses, and only the one professor mentioned by Akim, an ex–New York cop named Billy Pinto, who was kicked off the force for firing his weapon at a slow-cooking steak on a grill during a police department barbecue in Ozone Park, Queens.

“I can't switch,” said Akim. “The other concentrations are all filled. I wanted Communications Arts, but I was rejected by Professor Lipman's How to Write for the
New York Times
course—the prerequisite for the concentration.”

“I thought you were a straight-A student.”

“I am. Professor Lipman said the
Times
only wanted straight-A-minus students.”

Peace gulped. Joan Lipman, a former editor of the recently instituted
Times
Young Gay and Straight Celebrity Styles section, was on his committee. He'd put her there because if he hadn't included someone from the New Pen, he would have been accused of reactionary traditionalism. “Why is she looking for A-minuses?”

“She said it's the only acceptable standard for the paper. She said a record of straight A-minuses indicates a student will give back just what the teacher says but with some special words included in the pieces to add flair. The
Times
favors ‘brio' and ‘luminous.' I told her I wanted to write arts criticism. I mentioned Bernard Malamud. She said, ‘Who's that?' I said, ‘Who's Bernard Malamud? Only one of the two or three greatest writers of the twentieth century.' She said, ‘There you go, Akim'—assuring me
that she had only the warmest feelings toward Muslims—‘everyone knows it's Philip Roth who is one of the two or three greatest writers of the twentieth century. The
Book Review
said so.' Then she said, ‘I've never heard of Mr. Malamute'!”

“I could take you in English,” Peace said.

“No thanks, Professor Porterfield. The English have done too much harm to my fellow Arabs.” He glanced about. “You haven't seen Matha Polite today, have you?” Peace shook his head. “You know, I'm deeply in love with her, but she told me that if I went near her, she'd mace my balls.”

“Why don't you find another girl?”

“Better than Matha?”

 

BY THE TIME PEACE CLIMBED THE SHORT FLIGHT OF STAIRS
to the conference room, he'd hoped the mad dogs of the day were behind him. But when he opened the door, there was his committee. They were seated around the refectory table, each face turned toward him like a heliotropic plant. He surveyed them counterclockwise: there was Penny Kettlegorf from Fine Arts, Heine Heilbrun from the Theater Department, Molton Kramer from History, John Petersen Booth from Chemistry, Keelye Smythe, his English Department colleague, and Joan A-minus Lipman. At Peace's appearance, all six broke into applause, and Kettlegorf, who tended to express her thoughts musically, sang “We've Only Just Begun to Live.”

“Professor Porterfield,” said Kettlegorf, “I believe I've come up with a new curriculum that should solve all our problems!” She was a gangly brunette with a face full of aimless enthusiasms, a serrulate mouth, and hands like fronds, which she would flap rhythmically in states of excitement, which were frequent. Unmarried, she claimed to have given her heart to a ship's captain who never returned from sea, and for whom she had pined as a younger woman and paced a widow's walk wearing widow's weeds. The story was undercut by the fact that she'd grown up in Lawrence, Kansas, but no one bothered to make much of it.

“That's great, Penny,” said Peace. “We're eager to hear it.”

“But Professor Kramer has a plan, too,” said Heilbrun. An epigraph without a text, Heilbrun, a bachelor, expressed himself in tones that yoked fear with stupefaction. His hands were hairless, and he was so devoid of definition that had he perished in a blaze, no one could have identified the teeth. Yet he dressed theatrically, usually in Edwardian outfits. Today he was wearing a Wedge-wood—navy tailcoat, plain blue waistcoat, and striped trousers.

“I have a plan, too,” confirmed Kramer, whose wife kept a mother-of-pearl-plated revolver under her pillow. His echolalia was mitigated by his tendency to repeat himself.